SAN FRANCISCO / City losing key advocate for homeless to national effort

The loudest, most persistent voice for the homeless in San Francisco over the past two decades is taking his act national.

As director of the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness since 1988, Paul Boden has screamed during City Hall protests, picketed the homes of mayors and become one of the activists City Hall bureaucrats least like to face. His refusal to compromise, and his ready corps of supporters, have put him at the forefront of every fight over homeless policy from then-Mayor Frank Jordan's police-heavy Matrix program -- a crackdown on nuisance offenses -- during the early 1990s to Mayor Gavin Newsom's Care Not Cash welfare-slashing plan of the 2000s.

Boden, 45, will still live in San Francisco, and he has no budget or salary yet for his new operation. But after 17 years of heading the city's most influential homeless advocacy group, he says he simply decided it was time for a change.

"It's been long enough, and this new opportunity came up, so I took it," Boden said this week as he packed boxes at the coalition's office on Turk Street, a scruffy enclave overflowing with file cabinets and posters proclaiming "F -- Bush" and "Homes Not Jails."

He talked of how it's useful to periodically bring new blood into an organization, so this will be good for the coalition -- but the fact is, he has long felt just as passionate about national issues as he has about local ones. His new gig will give him his best chance yet to put his stamp on them.

"I want the feds to recognize that there is someone in San Francisco holding them accountable," Boden said. "We need to make it so they cannot ignore this problem, the way they always want to."

His first priority, if he gets enough donor funding to open an office, will be to advocate locally for the National Housing Trust Fund and the Bringing America Home Act, two House of Representatives bills to provide housing, jobs and other homeless relief. He's already familiar with the issues, having helped create the Community Housing Partnership, which has created homeless housing with counseling services since 1990, as well as shelter advocacy, job search and street-death prevention teams.

Boden also had a hand in crafting major city homelessness policies over the years, including last summer's 10-Year Plan to Abolish Chronic Homelessness, which emphasizes the development of housing programs with supportive services on the premises.

Newsom, who took a lot of rhetorical punches from Boden over his Care Not Cash program, which cuts welfare to the homeless and instead gives them shelter or housing, wishes him well -- as does the city Board of Supervisors, which declared Saturday "Paul Boden Day."

"He's an honorable foe," Newsom said. "Not everybody is. He's come into my office in jeans and an old T-shirt and let loose with that colorful language of his, but you always knew where he was coming from. In the past year or so, he and I have been getting along in ways we never have in the past. I've grown to respect him -- his passion and his advocacy."

The mayor said he was "actually very excited" when Boden told him he will be working on federal issues, because "in the final analysis, we fight the same battles and have the same goals in mind. We just have differences in how we get there."

Nobody at the coalition seems to be happy about him leaving. He helped found the group one year before taking over as director, and built it to a 10- employee operation with an annual budget of $575,000, where the mostly formerly homeless workers -- including Boden -- earn $25,000 a year, plus $4,000 extra if they have children.

"It's going to be a tough transition," said coalition worker Juan Prada, 39, who will be interim director while the group hunts for a replacement. "Nobody else has the long-term perspective he has."